Watch the 'Ring of Fire' Solar Eclipse Online Sunday

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If you're not lucky enough to live in the path of this Sunday's
(May 20) "ring of fire" solar eclipse, you can still watch the
spectacular event online.

Several different organizations will broadcast live footage of
the
solar eclipse Sunday, as seen through telescopes in various
locations around the world. Viewers can track the eclipse as it
moves from East Asia, crosses the Pacific and darkens the skies
over much of western Northern America. SPACE.com will offer
several of the solar eclipse webcasts for readers.

The Slooh Space Camera, for example, will stream live feeds from
telescopes in Japan, California, Arizona, and New Mexico,
starting at 5:30 p.m. EDT (2130 GMT). Viewers will be able to
snap their own pictures of the eclipse via the website, Slooh
officials said. To watch, go to Slooh's homepage on Sunday:
http://events.slooh.com/

Sunday's celestial event is what's known as an annular solar
eclipse, in which the moon blocks most of the solar disk but
leaves a ring of sunlight blazing around the moon's
circumference.

The full "ring of fire" effect will be visible to observers in
parts of eight states in the western United States during the
late afternoon and evening Sunday. Much of the rest of North
America will be treated to a partial eclipse.

"The western United States will enjoy bizarre solar effects that
only occur every few decades. In the annularity path, which will
be about 147 miles (237 km) wide when hitting our shores, the
black moon will stand like a bull's-eye in front of the sun, its
motion through space in-your-face obvious," said astronomer Bob
Berman, who will be a commentator on the Slooh Space Camera
webcast, in a statement.

"In a wider zone that includes most western states, the sun
becomes an eerie narrow crescent," Berman added. "At maximum
eclipse, the lighting on the ground will grow strange. Shadows of
trees and bushes will contain thousands of tiny crescents, as
spaces between leaves become pinhole cameras."

Annular eclipses, whose name derives from the Latin "annulus," or
"little ring," are similar to total eclipses in that they occur
when the moon lines up dead-on with the sun. But in this case,
the moon is near apogee — the farthest point from Earth in its
orbit around our planet — so it's too small in the sky to cover
the sun's face completely.

Slooh Space Camera is not the only skywatching website offering a
free webcast of the solar eclipse.

The electronics company Panasonic will broadcast live eclipse
footage from the top of Japan's iconic Mt. Fuji,
Sky and Telescope Magazine reports. The broadcast crew will
scale the 12,390-foot (3,776-meter) peak with the aid of climbing
guides.

Finally, Sky and Telescope reports, amateur astronomer Scotty
Degenhart will broadcast from Nevada's Area 51, a patch of desert
about 80 miles (130 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas. His feed
will be available here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/scottys-sky

While nothing can quite compare to the beauty and grandeur of a
total solar eclipse, annular eclipses are pretty spectacular in
their own right. And all you have to do to watch Sunday's is just
log on to your computer.

Editor's note: If you snap a great photo of Sunday's annular
solar eclipse and would like it to be considered for use in a
story or gallery, please send it to SPACE.com managing editor
Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com.

You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on
Twitter:@michaeldwall.
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